Dave Haynie Talks About Developing The Commodore Amiga

[Iggy]

Both C= and Amiga were big sellers in Europe.
65816 was compatible enough for Apple.
C128 sold a few millions, I think a nicer 65816 based system could have even sold more. MOS could have had developed a 32 bit CPU in house, freeing C= from shackels of Motorola and their pricing.

Amiga, as nice and as advanced as it was, lost Commodore 3 years of momentum and a lot of money untill A500 took off.
The PC model of backwards compatibility could have been applied on the C= 8(C64) -> 16(C65816) -> 32(6532) bit line. The C64 was the 2nd biggest platform in the 80s, it was foolish not to take advantage of that.

The view of an obvious C64 fan.
Frankly, rather than trying to morph the 8 bit C64 into a 16 then 32 bit machine, a investment in evolving than Amiga platform would have made more sense.
After all, the Amiga had an operating system.
To this day people with any sense focus on evolving that, rather than focusing on fixed hardware specs.

[psxphill]

Both C= and Amiga were big sellers in Europe.
65816 was compatible enough for Apple.

Apple II didn't have VIC and SID with all the cycle accurate requirements that go with it.
 

a investment in evolving than Amiga platform would have made more sense.

Unfortunately their investment was AAA. The engineers that rode that train ought to be ashamed of themselves.

[WolfToTheMoon]

The view of an obvious C64 fan.
Frankly, rather than trying to morph the 8 bit C64 into a 16 then 32 bit machine, a investment in evolving than Amiga platform would have made more sense.
After all, the Amiga had an operating system.
To this day people with any sense focus on evolving that, rather than focusing on fixed hardware specs.

The morphing worked for PC, and in a way, for Apple.
Operating system can always be written, several million C64s sold by 85' and the software market around it are worth a lot more than an operating system, no matter how advanced.

[Iggy]

@WolfToTheMoon

I can't think of a single legacy PC app I use, but I'm still using Windows.
If I want to run C64 apps (or Amiga for that matter) I can always run an emulator.
Software is the crucial issue here, not hardware, so in the end I think I made my point.